I can just picture it now… Nick lands in the street, and the woman (seeing just an ordinary V-22 helicopter) says, “Hey, I thought you were with the cable company!” And Jonah says, “Oh, that’s just my side job. Normally I work at a donut shop!” And then he climbs aboard and they take off.

Has it been stated where they are? Because I was on Google trying to figure out why a sea monster would be named after Tony Stark’s bestie and it turns out there is in fact (well, for certain values of “fact”) a Rhode Island Sea Monster. (One reported sighting, plus a weird serpentine skeleton.) No-one appears to have actually named it Rhodey, but it fits with lake monster names like Nessie, Morag, Champ, etc.

This is all starting to seem a little connected. Given the suspicious timing of Cerebriac’s malfunction I’d offer two unlikely theories:
1. Is Panoptica, with a power boost from Cerebriac (thus it’s offline for other uses), a powerful enough psychic to induce reality blindness nationwide?
2. Is Cerebriac itself somehow causing the reality blindness after having been hacked by Electron – who’s now working for the “private sector company” Anasigma?

#1 seems more unlikely since Panoptica couldn’t or wouldn’t nudge Jonah into joining AGI, but fiction doesn’t always follow internal logic. If it were to be #1 I’d wonder if anyone has ever seen Panoptica in the flesh – it would be just like Mr. Green to be using her image through mental projection as another puppet.

Lets toss in another possibility. I and some others have noted out loud in the past that homicidal behavior isn’t the sort of thing one normally associates with superheroes. Why should we think that whoever is inducing the reality blindness is such a sport that this would be the only mind control they engage in? o_O

We’ve always had reservations about superheroes and their goodwill and motivations. Can we trust either, short-term or long-term? What is a superhero, but a supervillain doing good? What is good and evil, really?

And since they don’t generally step in until someone has begun changing the world for the worse, most superheroes want to change the world back to being better.

Politicians’ true motives, however — regardless of their stated intentions — are truly a mystery to everyone but they themselves. Of all humans (and mind you, politicians do not come even close to being superhuman, so they don’t answer the above question anyway), politicians — all politicians — are some of the most manipulative, mendacious, malicious, and yes, often stupid, human beings on the planet. And they get paid the most to do it. Heaven help us if a superhuman actually did become a politician, because they would almost invariably be a supervillain.

Which is why I dislike political commentary on comics. I prefer my comics to be an escape from real life, not to be compared to it.

You are at least partially right about #2. Cerebriac has probably been hacked to keep it off line since written records aren’t affected by the Crown (as evidenced by the drawings all over this house). With AG-I unable to find any reference to the creatures who were integrated into the larger communities, the AG-I can act as the wetwork squad for Anasigma.

I think you are likely right about Cerebriac having been hacked. That could definitely explain why they’ve been having problems with it. If that’s the case, then AG-I is probably an ignorant tool, rather than a malicious one.